Love concurs all? When you want to express agreement, you concur (M-W). When you want to say overcome or gain mastery of something, you conquer (M-W). And when you want to say that love will triumph above everything, you say love conquers all. And that something on which I think we can all concur.

September 27, 2011

I’m thinking that one thing that could pretty much take the joy out of a brand new tattoo celebrating a major moment in your life would be to find that the tattoo has a typo in it. For example, if you’re Brad Marchand of the Boston Bruins, and you just won the Stanley Cup (which was kind of a big deal around these here parts), and you get a tattoo that announces that you and your teammates are Stanley Cup Champians.

August 12, 2009

While MPR is not a big fan of Lady Gaga’s oeuvre, the word nerd in me is intrigued by reports of her new tattoo. According to an article:

The 23-year-old star, her real name Stefani Germanotta, showed off her newest body art Sunday night before performing the hit songs “Poker Face,” “Just Dance” and “Paparazzi” at Seoul’s Olympic Hall during the Asian leg of her “Fame Ball” tour.

The curling script on her left arm is a souvenir from a midnight session at a tattoo parlor in Osaka, Japan.

“It says ‘In the deepest hour of the night, confess to yourself that you would die if you were forbidden to write. And look deep into your heart where it spreads its roots, the answer, and ask yourself, must I write?'” she said.

The quote, in German, comes from the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, whom she described as her “favorite philosopher.”

Have not been able to locate a photo of said tattoo. Perhaps she is saving it for her submission to Literary Tattoos.

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Bonus MRP moment: Who says something like this about themselves? “I believe in the power of iconography, which was something that Andy Warhol did, and it’s repeating an image over and over again. So I rarely change the shape of my hair.” Apparently, Gaga does.

August 24, 2008

It seems like everywhere I turn, lately, there’s someone saying something about semicolons. So it was no surprise to come across this image on the Word yesterday. Yes, there’s someone out there (Rachel Manwill, an editor for PR Newswire, to be specific) who’s gone and gotten themselves a semicolon tattoo:

The credit probably belongs to Trevor Butterworth, who in 2005–citing [Lynne] Truss as partial inspiration–wrote a 2,700-word essay on the semicolon in the Financial Times. Butterworth, who had worked in the States, wondered why so many Americans shared Donald Barthelme’s sense that the mark was “ugly as a tick on a dog’s belly.” His answer: As a culture, we Yanks distrust nuance and complexity.

But are you possibly over the whole semicolon thing? Then I give you The Ampersand.

Very popular are Le Petit Prince, Dr. Seuss, and this quotation from Kurt Vonnegut, “Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.” Also, Sylvia Plath and E.E. Cummings (shoot, that was my idea!). My favorite might have been a tattoo of Harriet the Spy.

Which got me to thinking: is there a literary quotation that I connect with so much that I’d want to have permanently engraved on my skin? I’m still thinking . . . meanwhile, I’d be interested to hear your ideas (and gosh, if you actually have one, let’s hear about that, too!).